Building A Diwheel To Add More Tank Controls To Your Commute

October 7, 2025 by 2 Comments

It’s often said that one should not reinvent the wheel, but that doesn’t mean that you cannot change how the use of said wheel should be interpreted. After initially taking the rather zany concept of a monowheel for a literal ride, [Sam Barker] decided to shift gears, did a ‘what if’ and slapped a second monowheel next to the first one to create his diwheel vehicle. Using much thicker steel for the wheels and overall much more robust construction than for his monowheel, the welding could commence.

It should be said here that the concept of a diwheel, or dicycle, isn’t entirely new, but the monowheel – distinct from a unicycle – is much older, with known builds at least as far back as the 19th century. Confusing, self-balancing platforms like Segways are also referred to as ‘dicycles’, while a diwheel seems to refer specifically to what [Sam] built here. That said, diwheels are naturally stable even without gyroscopic action, which is definitely a big advantage.

The inner frame for [Sam]’s diwheel is built out of steel too, making it both very robust and very heavy. High-tech features include suspension for that smooth ride, and SLS 3D-printed nylon rollers between the inner frame and the wheels. After some mucking about with a DIY ‘lathe’ to work around some measurement errors, a lot more welding and some questionable assembly practices, everything came together in the end.

This is just phase one, however, as [Sam] will not be installing pedals like it’s an old-school monowheel. Instead it’ll have electrical drive, which should make it a bit less terrifying than the Ford Ka-based diwheel we featured in 2018, but rather close to the electric diwheel called EDWARD which we featured back in 2011. We hope to see part two of this build soon, in which [Sam] will hopefully take this beast for its first ride.

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JawnCon Returns This Weekend

October 7, 2025 by 1 Comment

For those local to the Philadelphia area, a “jawn” can be nearly anything or anyone — and at least for this weekend, it can even be a hacker con building up steam as it enters its third year. Kicking off this Friday at Arcadia University, JawnCon0x2 promises to be another can’t-miss event for anyone with a curious mind that lives within a reasonable distance of the Liberty Bell.

The slate of talks leans slightly towards the infosec crowd, but there’s really something for everyone on the schedule. Presentations such as Nothing is Safe: An Introduction to Hardware (In)Security and Making the GameTank – A New, Real 8-Bit Game Machine will certainly appeal to those of us who keep a hot soldering iron within arm’s reach, while Rolling Recon & Tire Prints: Perimeter Intrusion Detection and Remote Shenanigans via Rogue Tire Stem RF and Get More Radio Frequency Curious will certainly appeal to the radio enthusiasts.

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Qualcomm Introduces The Arduino Uno Q Linux-Capable SBC

October 7, 2025 by 33 Comments

Generally people equate the Arduino hardware platforms with MCU-centric options that are great for things like low-powered embedded computing, but less for running desktop operating systems. This looks about to change with the Arduino Uno Q, which keeps the familiar Uno formfactor, but features both a single-core Cortex-M33 STM32U575 MCU and a quad-core Cortex-A53 Qualcomm Dragonwing QRB2210 SoC.

According to the store page the board will ship starting October 24, with the price being $44 USD. This gets you a board with the aforementioned SoC and MCU, as well as 2 GB of LPDDR4 and 16 GB of eMMC. There’s also a WiFi and Bluetooth module present, which can be used with whatever OS you decide to install on the Qualcomm SoC.

This new product comes right on the heels of Arduino being acquired by Qualcomm. Whether the Uno Q is a worthy purchase mostly depends on what you intend to use the board for, with the SoC’s I/O going via a single USB-C connector which is also used for its power supply. This means that a USB-C expansion hub is basically required if you want to have video output, additional USB connectors, etc. If you wish to run a headless OS install this would of course be much less of a concern.

2025 Hackaday Supercon: More Wonderful Speakers

October 7, 2025 by 1 Comment

Supercon is just around the corner, and we’re absolutely thrilled to announce the second half of our slate! Supercon will sell out so get your tickets now before it’s too late. If you’re on the fence, we hope this pushes you over the line. And if it doesn’t, stay tuned — we’ve still got to tell you everything about the badge and the fantastic keynote speaker lineup.

(What? More than one keynote speaker? Unheard of!)

And as if that weren’t enough, there’s delicious food, great live music, hot soldering irons, and an absolutely fantastic crowd of the Hackaday faithful, and hopefully a bunch of new folks too. If you’re a Supercon fan, we’re looking forward to seeing you again, and if it’s your first time, we’ll be sure to make you feel welcome. Continue reading “2025 Hackaday Supercon: More Wonderful Speakers” →

Can A Coin Cell Make 27 Volts?

October 7, 2025 by 2 Comments

We have all no doubt at some point released the magic smoke from a piece of electronics, it’s part of what we do. But sometimes it’s a piece of electronics we’re not quite ready to let go, and something has to be fixed. Chris Greening had a board just like that, a 27 volt generator from an LCD panel, and he crafted a new circuit for it.

The original circuit (which we think he may have drawn incorrectly), uses a small boost converter IC with the expected inductor and diode. His replacement is the tried and tested joule thief, but with a much higher base resistor than its normal application in simply maintaining a battery voltage. It sucks 10 mA from the battery and is regulated with a Zener diode, but there’s still further room for improvement. Adding an extra transistor and using the Zener as a feedback component causes the oscillator to shut off as the voltage increases, something which in this application is fine.

It’s interesting to see a joule thief pushed into a higher voltage application like this, but we sense perhaps it could be made more efficient by seeking out an equivalent to the boost converter chip. Or even a flyback converter.

Smart Bulbs Are Turning Into Motion Sensors

October 7, 2025 by 19 Comments

If you’ve got an existing smart home rig, motion sensors can be a useful addition to your setup. You can use them for all kinds of things, from turning on lights when you enter a room, to shutting off HVAC systems when an area is unoccupied. Typically, you’d add dedicated motion sensors to your smart home to achieve this. But what if your existing smart light bulbs could act as the motion sensors instead?

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A Childhood Dream, Created And Open Sourced

October 7, 2025 by 8 Comments

Some kids dream about getting a pony, others dream about a small form factor violin-style MIDI controller. [Brady Y. Lin] was one of the latter, and now, with the skills he’s learning at Northwestern, he can make that dream a reality — and share it with all of us as an open source hardware project.

The dream instrument’s name is Stradex1, and it’s a lovely bit of kit. The “fretless” neck is a SoftPot linear potentiometer being sampled by an ADS1115 ADC — that’s a 16-bit unit, so while one might pedantically argue that there are discreet frets, there’s 2^15 of them, which is functionally the same as none at all. Certainly it’s enough resolution for continuous-sounding pitch control, as well as vibrato, as you can see at 3:20 in the demo video below. The four buttons that correspond to the four strings of a violin aren’t just push-buttons, but also contain force sensors (again, sampled by the 16-bit ADC) to allow for fine volume control of each tone.

A few other potentiometers flesh out the build, allowing control over different MIDI parameters, such as what key [Brady] is playing on. The body is a combination of 3D printed plastic and laser-cut acrylic, but [Brady] suggests you could also print the front and back panels if you don’t happen to have a laser cutter handy.

This project sounds great, and it satisfies the maker’s inner child, so what’s not to love. We’ve had lots of MIDI controllers on Hackaday over the years — everything from stringless guitars  to wheel-less Hurdy-Gurdies to say nothing of laser harps galore — but somehow, we’ve never had a MIDI violin. The violin hacks we have featured tend to be either 3D printed or comically small.

If you like this project but don’t feel like fabbing and populating the PCB, [Brady] is going to be giving one away to his 1000th YouTube subscriber. As of this writing, he’s only got 800, so that could be you!

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